Obama Got His Groove Back, But Can He Keep It Up On Immigration And Climate Change?

The Republicans were clamoring that the failure of the health care bill   would be “Obama’s Waterloo”. It is turning out that the GOP and their henchmen of  the Tea Party “movement” were wrong. The bill was not Obama’s Waterloo but his Austerlitz (to refer to one of Napoleon’s military master piece).

Last night, President Obama pulled what should be called a “Lyndon Johnson” on a stunned and powerless opposition. The bill passed last night is arguably the most important piece of legislation coming out of Congress since Medicare in 1965 and Social Security in the 1930s.

To pass the bill, the President had to campaign for it as hard as he did to get elected. Unfortunately for the Obama administration ambitious agenda, the personal involvement of the President to push the health care bill through Congress should have occurred last year. In effect, the President and the Democrats have now very little time to tackle two key reforms: Immigration reform and climate change.

The stumbling blocks for the immigration reform will come from the same quarters than the one from health care reform. In the last stretch of the so called health care “debate”, the discourse of the so called Tea Party movement showed its true color: namely racial slurs in the form of the N word peppered with homophobic epithets directed at Congressman Barney Frank. In other words, the Tea Party and their allies from various white supremacist groups will be mentioning terms such as “wet back” and of course the N…. word again. The Democrats should take on the immigration reform first. The Latino community is getting impatient with was have being so far a lack of initiative from the Democrats and the Obama administration to tackle the pressing issue.

The Climate Change bill will just be as challenging to pass. The oil industry and coal industries will make sure their respective lobbyists are “hard at work” on both Republicans and Democrats Congressmen  from the get go. And of course, in the streets, the Tea Party activists will all of sudden become the party of “Drill Baby Drill” instead of the one of “Kill The Health Care Bill”.

If the Obama administration has learned anything from the Congressional adventures of the health care bill it should be that to get anything done in Washington (or elsewhere) tactical force must be used. The Obama administration wasted a year trying to be “convivial” with the GOP, and by doing so got very little done. Applying the same type of Congressional strategies which successfully passed the health care bill should be used in  a very timely manner by President Obama and the Democrats. Otherwise, depending on the result of November’s elections both legislation concerning climate change and immigration reform could be scrapped for a long time.